“It’s a long way to the entrance, 3 km, it’s takes at least thirty minutes to walk there.” Basic travel 101, never trust information from a tout. However, if you’re down with a cold the brain doesn’t work as well. I paid 5 Yuan (80 cents) for a shuttle ticket because I didn’t feel like walking 2 miles to the entrance to see the Terracotta Warriors.
I got my ticket punched and joined a 6 foot wide pushing and shoving mass of tourists for almost 30 minutes knowing all along I was being stupid. Finally, I got on the environmentally friendly oversized battery operated golf cart and enjoyed a relaxing 2 minute ride to the entrance of the famed Terracotta Warriors. 3km? It would have been an easy ten minute walk for a blind man following a whistle.
Ok, in a nutshell, the actual Terracotta Warriors and the archeological find are incredibly cool and amazing. However, the way it’s set up and the overabundance of tour groups greatly distracts from experiencing the site. There’s something artificial about it even though it’s real. Kind of hard to describe.
Refurbished clay warriors neatly aligned in rows beneath a state of the art constructed warehouse style canopy made me feel more like I was walking into a special affects sound stage at Paramount Studios than a world famous archeological site. In a way I kept asking myself if the warriors were real or imitation. After all, practically everything in China is a knockoff fake. At the site everything is so set up and staged. Even the stuff that’s not supposed to look set up.
The actual find consists of over 7,000 clay warriors and some incredibly amazing bronzes of horses and chariot etc. Quite unbelievable. They were all created under the order of Emperor Qin Shi Huang who felt the items and soldiers would help him in the afterlife.
Qin Shi Huang died suddenly and shortly thereafter his empire was overthrown by a peasant uprising. The mausoleum that housed the warriors was destroyed and everything lay to rest for over 2,000 years. In 1974 a farmer digging a well unearthed what I believe was a terracotta warrior head and the rest is history. Quite remarkable actually.
I think if you were to visit the site in the early days of discovery it would have been beyond amazing but now there’s something odd about the site. I suppose if you are lucky enough to visit when not many people are around it would be a nicer experience but for me it was really kind of hard to enjoy with so many tourists. Especially since I had my idiot hat on in the beginning and stood in that ridiculous line for almost 30 minutes! What a racket…..
Oh well, the bottom line is that if you’re in Xian, you gotta go,,,, Regardless…….
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